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Monday, 16 September 2013

Dedicated DNS resolvers for your Favorite websites !

In the cyber world, everyone is under an ISP who will have their own DNS to serve their customers. But there are third-party DNS solutions. They are often faster than our ISPs servers, speeding up your visit to every single website.

They can also provide other fun features. OpenDNS, for example, offers parental controls, typo correct (type in a “.cm” domain that doesn't exist, and get automatically forwarded to the “.com” URL instead). Cool ! isn't it ?

Some services try to stream your bulky content from the closest servers to you; since Google and OpenDNS block those services ability to figure out where you are, you miss out on the speed benefit of being physically closer to the servers. Surely, every geek will have faced this situation when they want to resolve their favorite websites like itunes.com to resolve faster using google dns. We have to use our resolvers wisely :-)

Here is how to configure custom DNS servers for specific websites ;-)

Create a directory called resolver in the /etc/ directory

Create a file called itunes.com. Inside that file, paste the following text:

Now, when you go to visit the domain, your Linux machine will use the custom nameservers you provided in those text files.

To test this yourself you can use OpenDNS’s servers just for OpenDNS’s website. Create a file called /etc/resolver/opendns.com, and paste in OpenDNS’s servers:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Now, when you visit opendns.com/welcome, you should see a checkmark and a message indicating that you’re using OpenDNS’s servers—even though at this moment, you’re only using them for that specific domain.